I'm fairly new to Linux (about 2 months worth), and I've been thinking of getting my old IBM (385CD) out of the closet, and install some distro of Linux on it. Here are the specs of the laptop:

* 150MHz Pentium MMX
* 48MB RAM
* 2.1GB HDD
* Floppy
* CD-ROM

So, now that you know how slow (and why it is in the closet) my laptop is, what would you people recommend? Keep in mind that I am, after all, a newbie when it comes to doing ANYTHING in Linux. I've thought about DSL or Slackware. I want it to run fairly fast, however, I want a GUI. I don't need KDE or GNOME, because I tried RH9, and that was a big mistake. Some small X windows GUI would be nice (I think fluxbox may be what I'm looking for?).

What do I want to use this computer for? Well, eventually, I would want to install a WiFi PCMCIA card in it, and mostly use it for web surfing. Some nice office products would be nice, as well as using vi for editing. So, as you can see, I don't really need it to do much, except look decent (GUI), and be fairly newbie-friendly.

I've tried DSL already, however, I've run into some problems already, being that screen is not readable. It looks like Slackware is used by more people, and has decent support FAQs and what not, so I was thinking of trying that. However, I don't really know exactly what I'm doing when it comes to installing. I don't care about what is on the hard disk right now, I'd rather start from square one, and re-partition the drive correctly.

Does anyone think this will go well at all?

Try Debian or VectorLinux. Vector is a small Slackware-based distribution which installed and run very well on my 166MHz Thinkpad 760XD.

Debian is very flexible and will work fine on old low-spec machines as the default installation is pretty well balanced (not too much of anything), and installing new software is very easy thanks to the neat package management system.


Håkan

hw-tph.

Thanks for the quick reply. Wow, looks even simpler than Slackware. I think I'll give Vector Linux a try. The installation instructions seem pretty clear. I'm not for sure if my CD-ROM is bootable, it is selectable in the BIOS as a bootable drive, but I'm not sure. DSL was acting funny, because it would put me into the GRUB bootloader. I eventually went with a Windows boot disk, and looked at the files on the CD for DSL. I tried a few things, but nothing seemed to work. Then a reboot, and the DSL install was starting... Very strange. Anyway, thanks for pointing me in that direction. If I don't have any luck with VL, I'll try out Debian.

Do you have any suggestion as to which GUI I should use? I think I need to stay away from KDE or GNOME, wouldn't you think? I used GNOME on RH9 and the thing was horriable. Took about 5-6 minutes to boot, and then everything was slow...

I assume I'll use parted to partition the HD. Any suggestions there? I am assuming that I only need 2, a bootable partition and a swap partition that is about double the size of the RAM. Sound good to you?

Yeah, on a laptop with a such a small disk I too would opt to just have a bootable Linux-formatted partition and a swap partition at about 96 to 128MB. As for GUI, something like Fluxbox (or even the original BlackBox) would probably work well. Stay away from the current Fluxbox development versions as they are a lot more resource-hungry compared to good old "stable" Fluxbox and BlackBox. You will probably not want to use anti-aliasing in the GUI anyway since it requires quite a lot of CPU muscles. There are a lot of other lightweight window managers that could do well on a machine like that. WindowMaker and IceWM are other options that don't come with the overhead of a full-blown desktop environment like Gnome or KDE.

My old 760XD doesn't support booting from CD at all so I had to create a boot disk to boot it but when the installer was up and running I had no problem installing from the CD-ROM.


Håkan

If you don't seem to want to install Linux onto you laptop. You can always use a live-cd. You can actually boot linux off of a CD without installing any part of linux onto you hard disk.

Try Knoppix.

Or Knoppix-STD. ....i know what your thinking "std". "STD" actually stands for security tools distrobution.

I myself prefer Knoppix-STD.

Thank you all for your help. I've always come back to this forum, because eventually, I seem to get some good answers to my problems. I'll see what I can do about a GUI once I get VL running. I have heard of IceWM and windowmaker, so maybe I'll try one of those. Do they allow you to choose which one to use in the install, or is that a manual change?

If all else fails, I'll give Knoppix a try. I think that is what DSL was based on, is it not?

J.

Knoppix is a Debian-based distribution, I don't know about DSL though. I also believe that IceWM, Fluxbox and perhaps also XFCE4 comes with Vector so you shouldn't have any problems trying those out to begin with.

Håkan

Okay. So my experience with VL was cool. Nice menus guide you through the setup, and everything seems to work correctly.

One problem, after everything was set up, I did a reboot, (after removing the install CD), and now all I see on the screen is a bunch of 99's written across it. It fills the upper third of the screen with them while crunching on the HD, and then stops and doesn't do anything else. Any ideas about this?

The next thing I tried, I put the install CD back in, and got the install boot: prompt. I followed the directions to use the CD to boot the Linux install on the hard drive. That worked. Only problem is, I can't boot without the CD???

Help please. VL is awesome, and I want to be able to use it.

It sounds like your bootloader is whacked, since you booted back into your hard drive install then just re-install grub/lilo and see if that fixes it.

rberry88

rberry88.

Thanks for the reply. Consider me a newbie though. Could you tell me how to go about doing that?

Thank you.
J.

wellll.....to put it simply:
Don't ask stupid questions, if you want to be laughed at, which can easily be found in google.com or in this forum.

And research never hurts .

I was able to solve the problem, thanks to some very helpful people. Here is a link, if anyone else runs into the same one.

http://vectorlinux.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=7991#7991

Ahem.

LinuxQuestions.org -- Where Linux newbies come for help. Crumb, what about that do you not understand? If you have nothing better to offer than criticism, then do us all a favor and quit wasting forum space and unregister your name, so that someone else can benefit from using it. OK, so maybe I got a little lazy, but after all, I did do some searching on a LILO users manual, however, in the 30 minutes I spent, I was unable to locate the official one. So, never mind, someone else was nice enough to help a new person out. I figure with all the Linux stuff out there, I've done a fair amount of "research" just trying to figure out the right distribution to install, after going through 3-4 by myself.

Great to hear you got it working, and props to pastored over on that other board for typing down a very helpful post.

crumb, please try to be helpful. Questions, asking and answering, is what this place is about.

Håkan

I've been searching the web for quite a while now because of a problem with my IBM Thinkpad 760XL - the screen would look weird after installing Linux. The distros I tried were Mandrake 9.2 (which I use on my PC) and Red Hat 9.0 for testing purposes. Both had the same problems with the Trident 9660 Chip.
I'm downloading VectorLinux now to give it a try. Hope I can get it to work now.

Thanks for the help - reading of someone who got it working makes me feel more enthusiastic about it

AndyX

[edit]
I found out that using XFree4.3 would cause the screen-error. I've run a test with XFree3 and the screen looks allright.
Just thought someone might be interested in that.
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